French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced Thursday that France is restoring military service on a voluntary basis in the face of the growing threat posed by Russia and the risk of a new conflict breaking out in Europe.
Almost three decades after France scrapped conscription, the head of state unveiled the new programme during a visit to an infantry brigade stationed in southeastern France.
“A new national service is set to be gradually established, starting from next summer,” Macron said in a speech at the Varces military base, in the French Alps.
Young volunteers will serve in France’s mainland and oversea territories only, not in France’s military operations abroad, Macron said. Around 80% will be aged 18 and 19, with the rest made up of candidates aged up to 25 who have specific skills, such as engineers.
Macron’s announcement comes more than three and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Macron and other French officials warning that Moscow risks not stopping at Ukraine’s borders.
“The day that you send a signal of weakness to Russia — which for 10 years has made a strategic choice to become an imperial power again, that’s to say advance wherever we are weak — well, it will continue to advance,” the French president told radio RTL on Tuesday.
He said France will aim to spend €64 billion in annual defence spending in 2027, the last year of his second term. That would be double the €32 billion in annual spending when he became president in 2017.
France is not considering restoring conscription, which ended in the country in 1996.
The country’s top general, armed forces chief of staff Fabien Mandon, sparked uproar at home last week by warning that France must be ready “to lose its children”, adding that Russia is “preparing for a confrontation by 2030 with our countries”.
While around a dozen states have some form of conscription, the use of military service is uneven across Europe.
But France would join European countries like Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania which have brought it back in recent years, while others such as Denmark have toughened its terms.
Military service is seen as a way of bolstering armies with recruits, but also of providing a large pool of potential reservists, who could be called up in the case of a future war.
The French armed forces have approximately 200,000 active military personnel and 47,000 reservists, numbers expected to increase to 210,000 and 100,000 respectively by 2030.
Accused of warmongering by the left, General Mandon has expressed no regret over his comments last week, saying the aim was to “alert and prepare” amid a “rapidly deteriorating” context.
Mandon argued on Saturday that the reactions to his comments “show that this is something that was perhaps not sufficiently perceived in our population”.
But ahead of Thursday’s announcement, Macron and other officials have been at pains to douse the outcry caused by the general’s forthright comments and fears that French youth were heading for the front lines.
The president on Tuesday said he needed to dispel any notion “we are going to send our young people to Ukraine”. – France24.
